In gas springs of this type, a great many guide and damping pistons are known, which are of such design that differently constructed guide and damping pistons are required for different housing diameters or different piston rod diameters.
This approach has many obvious disadvantages. Thus, many sizes of pistons must be fabricated, each size having an outer diameter corresponding to the inner diameter of a different cylinder. Besides providing increased cost of manufacture due to the necessity of making so many different sizes of pistons, there are additional warehousing problems and quality control problems.
Other problems in these gas springs have included an overly complex construction, occasional difficulties maintaining good guidance of the sliding piston within the cylinder, and occasional problems from binding of the piston rod causing leakage of gas from the cylinder.